Who is Gene Stoltzfus

The blog is an effort to reflect on 45 years of experience in peacemaking and stimulate more critical discussion and engaged peacemaking world wide. I came to this work first as a civilian volunteer and conscientious objector in Viet Nam where I served beginning in 1963. Since then the great tree of peace initiatives has developed many branches, some of which rarely talk to each other.
I was for 16 years the director of Christian Peacemaker Teams. Since my retirement I continue to travel in various countries as a promoter of Christian peacemaking and as a witness to the effects of violence. I believe that our world desperately needs unarmed peacemakers and that in order to do sacrificial nonviolent engagement we need a confident spiritual core that is informed by critical thinking. All such work will affect the body politic, and will lead through periods of resistance to change.
At root all of us in this world have the potential to share the power of love, a force that reaches far beyond sentimentality. An American, I live with my Canadian wife Dorothy Friesen near Fort Frances, a little known city of 8500 people that borders Minnesota in Northwest Ontario. Our area is dominated by the economics of a pulp mills.
About a quarter of my neighbors in the Rainy River District are native Ojibway people who have lived here for centuries. Besides peacemaking I am learning to make simple furniture from willow twigs and natural bushes and trees from the forests.

Waterboarding is on my mind. I know you have expressed firm convictions that it is necessary. I also understand that as a politician you need to show progress in your efforts to prevail against terrorism. Since we both claim to be Christians I thought I would tell you a story from my own faith history that may be helpful for your deliberations regarding the use of waterboarding and other methods of torture to eliminate the enemy all the way to the gates of hell.

My strand of Christians traces our history back to Jesus through hard times, suffering, and moments of great integrity of life and faith. Historians tell me that the practice of waterboarding can be traced to the Spanish Inquisition in the same time frame as the persecution of my faith ancestors the Anabaptists, by the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation. Practices like waterboarding were used to put down the Protestant Reformers, Jews, witches and other heretics.

My ancestors were tortured because they refused to accept infant baptism although they accepted and promoted baptism for adults who could make intelligent free choices about becoming followers of Jesus. As the movement away from infant baptism spread, the basic issue was their lack of allegiance to the political authorities as symbolised by infant baptism. Despite pockets of pacifism within the movement for almost a century, Anabaptists were considered lawless, insurrectionists and enemies of the state.

Authorities were convinced that torture would stem the tide of re-baptizing that was then spreading throughout Europe and was considered a threat to state power. King Ferdinand the ruler of the time based in Spain believed that drowning, another use of water for persecution of Anabaptists, was an acceptable state response to the heresy. His people called it the third baptism.

William Schweiker, Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and director of the Martin Marty Center writes, “In the Inquisition, the practice was not drowning as such, but the threat of drowning, and the symbolic threat of baptism. The tortura del agua or toca entailed forcing the victim to ingest water poured into a cloth stuffed into the mouth in order to give the impression of drowning. Because of the wide symbolic meaning of “water” in the Christian and Jewish traditions (creation, the great flood, the parting of the Red Sea in the Exodus and drowning of the Egyptians, Christ’s walking on the water, and, centrally for Christians, baptism as a symbolic death that gives life, the practice takes on profound religious significance). Torture has many forms, but torture by water as it arose in the Roman Catholic and Protestant reformations seemingly drew some of its power and inspiration from theological convictions about repentance and salvation. It was, we must now surely say, a horrific inversion of the best spirit of Christian faith and symbolism….”

For my people and many others the story of torture by water does not end with the inquisition although many people were killed and wounded. We are still here. We still believe that adults can be trusted to decide about their faith. Anabaptists were among the forerunners of democracy where the people decide for themselves. The fact that we still exist demonstrates that the instruments of torture failed to eradicate us. In my people’s reexamination of the gospel through those five hundred years we have come to the conviction that Jesus’ teachings about enemy loving is not a teaching that can be temporarily suspended for purposes of emergency public policy. Our refusal to take up arms has gotten some of my people killed too, even in this country over the last 300 years, but not as many as the dangerous idea of baptising adults 500 years ago.

This story from my past which was first told to me by my parents, but later substantiated by people with greater competence in history than my family, has serious implications for foreign and even domestic policy. The lesson is that people with deep convictions find a way to survive, pass on their ideas and grow. I have no doubt that some of my ancestors may have confessed, changed their ideas, or recanted in order to avoid further torture like waterboarding. To tell you the truth I don’t even know what I would do in that situation. I do know that when Chicago police got nasty with me I just became really quiet and practised the highest form of passive resistance. I only did this when I became scared that I would do or say what they wanted me to. Their meanness did not put me at the point of death but it got me a little closer to the territory of torture.

Torture like waterboarding was practised in the Philippines when I worked there in the late 1970s. In that case it was based on the experience of several hundred years of Spanish rule and the practice of torture during the American put down of the Philippine independence struggle at the turn of the century. It didn’t stop the government opponents there either. Nor did it work in Viet Nam where I taught and organized in the 1960s although in both of these situations there may have been persons who chose to cooperate because they just couldn’t stand the pain of torture. More importantly the practices earned a culture of permanent suspicion for the perpetrators of torture and much disrespect for the country you now rule. This growing disrespect is not about to be overcome with subtle or flashy public diplomacy. Some survivors continue to be in a state of traumatic stress until the present.

So now I appeal to you in the name of God and in the name of our country that seeks to be a light to the nations to cast off the vestiges of the Spanish Inquisition. I appeal to you to bring policy out of the shadows of torture into a place where humans can make adult decisions. Could we agree to just try not being a nation that practices torture for the next 100 years, and see if such a consistent public policy brings us closer to a culture of hope on our planet.

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Appearing on Hardball, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) defended the use of waterboarding — and unlike other GOPers, he openly used the word “torture.”

“I would not limit our intelligence agencies’ ability to get information from people,” said Schock. “If they have a ticking time-bomb or some critical piece of information that can save American lives, I don’t believe that we should limit waterboarding or quite frankly any other alternative torture technique, if it means saving Americans’ lives.” http://tiny.cc/J1GUN.